As Christmas is not quite as active as it usually is, I have more time on my hands for Devader. My gift to you are tons of big and small changes and improvements. If you feel like giving me a small gift, I would really love a review. Hint, hint.

So what did I fix? To be honest I probably can’t even remember half the stuff I’ve done. The first alpha was a bit of a mess, as I was mainly interested in finding out if upgrading to a new version would fix a weird game-pad input problem on Linux. I ended up just making an alpha for Windows/Linux that was way ahead of any planned schedule.

Devader was no longer running on my 10 year old Linux laptop. The new alpha uses a 8192×8192 texture atlas for all the game images. But older graphic cards do not support that size. I managed to find an acceptable solution by simply scaling down the art and switching to a different rendering style. It’s a little pixelated compared to full resolution, but it works. It’s unlikely to affect many players, but at least I can now still test on my laptop.

Boss music was not playing. This caused a weird issue with music stacking up. The game thought the Boss music was playing which should mean level music is turned off. After the boss battle the boss music was turned off that was never turned on, leaving level music turned on as it was never turned off. So when the next level started, both level tracks were playing. Nice.
All due to a mistake where I wrote > instead of >= …
So now if you reach the Tower King you should feel the Christmas spirit.

Lightning was causing a few performance issues. In some cases a vast amount of lightning was created recursively, this has been limited by a lot.

Enemy spawning is now seeded, that means placement is not random. I had thought it was working before, but it certainly was not. Probably not something anyone noticed, but still kind of important. Choosing the same upgrades will now lead to a fairly consistent enemy spawning experience. I’m still not 100% sure it works all the time, but time will tell.

Commander
Ball of Destruction & Balls of Healing are now indestructible. This could be a good or a bad thing, I am really not sure, but I’ve decided to try it.

Warlord
The big choice after upgrades now highlights what you have selected. Still no actual visualization of what you will get, as some stuff might still be changed.
Piercing Chest cannon now does more damage to smaller enemies and less to larger creatures.
Shield-Field was rejecting some friendly units, this is no longer the case.

Bosses
Senalux lasers now have a short build up when they rotate, no more instant damage/kills. I’ve also changed the bouncing bullets. In general I’m trying to reduce chaos and randomness. Unfair deaths are not fun.

Dios Illuminus
Reworked the final boss again. The Warlord weapons were causing some significant issues (too easy). I’ve made quite a lot of changes to the attacks, giving a bit more space and some possibilities to graze bullets. It’s still possible that some combinations or tools are too strong/weak. In the image below you can see what I was using to help me balance and understand the HP, blue is at full health. Hotter colors mean less HP.

Discord: https://discord.gg/AWhsvN3